On Writing Online Hytertext Articles

2005-06-12T15:59:00Z

While browsing my recent paper, my colleague complained that I had no references at the end of my document. I said I didn’t need one. References are just a poor man’s way of creating hyperlinks when he has no hypertext.

However, we both agreed that having a list of cited resources is useful. I suggested (in Mozilla) selecting View Page Info - Links to get a list of hyperlinks of my document. This would be my references section. My colleague rightly noted that not all of my hyperlinks are for citations.

Agreeing, I decided to mark all my citations with a specific REL attribute. I also added a full bibliographic reference in the TITLE attribute. I feel a little bad about this last bit, because a bibliographic reference is something that should be full of markup and metadata; such is the price to pay when using a generic hyperlinking language.

In a related story, I suggested to another colleague that one ought to have internal hyperlink back to a definition of a term every time that term is used. He said that this would be way to much typing. I told him to use some sort of short cut (entity or macro) to stand in for the hyperlinked term. This can be done when both creating HTML and writing LATEX. He thinks this is a good idea and is going to try it out.